When I immigrated to the US around 6 years ago from Iran, I became aware of certain categories: I was a “brown person”, the academic sciences are “western science”, my knowledge is “traditional knowledge”. I can’t help but think, as Edward Said in Orientalism discusses, what “intellectual aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world?”

I am a scientist: I research how we communicate sciences to the public, and having been in the scientific community, I continue to see how power dynamics show themselves in the words we choose in our academic and artistic work. I have seen my cultural identity being separated from my scientific identity, whereas in reality, my cultural identity is built on a long historical line of scientists, explorers, and inventors, including that of my namesake, Abu Reyhan Biruni.

In this four art piece, I combine the scientific imageries with that of the Eastern art of Negar-gari, based on famous Iranian art pieces, motifs and personas: Lady Sun “Khorshid Khanoom” and the James Webb Space Telescope, The Persian horse and it’s anatomy and physiology, the water cycle in a Persian art inspired landscape, and elements of photosynthesis in another Persian art inspired environment. I’m hoping for these pieces to inspire conversations around our rhetoric, the history of science, scientific imagery, and the role of cultural Muslims in the advancement of sciences.